The Occupy Wall Street protesters have found a simple slogan that boils their frustration down to anger over the wealth gap.

Occupy Wall Street is a slogan without a handle, easy to mock and dismiss, but an increasingly popular tag line that packs a gut punch is giving the movement focus.

“We are the 99 per cent.”

Holding up handwritten personal stories of debt, cancer, job loss and suicide, anonymous victims of the financial meltdown are scrawling their stories on random pieces of paper, photographing them, and posting the results at http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/

It began in August with a simple call for stories on Tumblr. In September 291 people posted their stories. In the first five days of October, 387 people posted.

The stories on Tumblr point to a unifying theme behind the protest: Anger at the wealth gap between the executives who run corporate North America and ordinary people struggling with debt, job loss and foreclosure.

“I think it’s fascinating that the slogan has now changed,” says Megan Boler, a professor of media studies at OISE/University of Toronto.

“Occupy Wall Street can definitely give the sense of a fringe group of radicals. By calling it the 99 per cent, they are speaking for the middle class, for working families. There’s a sense of shared economic suffering.”

Boler says the 99 per cent refers to the widely circulated statistic that one per cent of the American population holds a disproportionate share of the country’s wealth – as much as 40 per cent by some calculations.

“This simple concept – that the vast majority of us are getting screwed because of policies that protect the rich minority – is the best populist message I’ve heard in years,” writes Nona Willis Aronowitz, an associate editor at Good Magazine www.good.is. “It distills the movement’s huge range of issues into one devastating phenomenon…the wealth gap.”

“We are the 99 per cent,” wasn’t conceived in a calculated fashion, but it is branding the movement with a gravitas that Occupy Wall Street lacks.

“It’s about 19 times better,” says advertising executive Geoffrey B. Roche, founder of Lowe Roche. “The other 99 per cent speaks to more of the emotion. It gets to the heart of the matter. Occupy Wall Street doesn’t resonate in the same way.”

Kalle Lasn, co-editor of Adbusters, the organization that launched the protest, said yesterday the idea that the protest is unfocused is sour grapes.

He believes protestors will begin focusing on taxing financial trades that earn banks and traders millions of dollars and on putting an end to what he calls the casino economy in the financial sector.

He is hoping millions of people around the world will take part in a protest October 29, the eve of the next meeting of the G20.

One woman on wearethe99percent.tumblr.com carefully printed her protest on paper and took a picture of it beside a box containing her mother’s ashes.

“My mother had no job, no healthcare to treat the mental and physical deterioration she suffered. She committed suicide 7/8/2010. She was the 99 per cent.”

Another woman held up an eviction notice saying she had to choose between food and rent. “We decided to eat and not pay rent. This is the notice I just received.”

“I bought my house in 2005 for $125,000 more than I sold it for in 2009,” wrote another man. “Where was my bailout? Where was my bonus for taking a risk that didn’t pay off and didn’t increase shareholder value? That’s right, Wall Street got my bonus instead.”

Another wrote her story on the back of a water bill she couldn’t pay.

“Shouldn’t the middle class be too big to fail?” asked another.

“I just want to live the American dream, but I’m not exactly sure what that is anymore, writes a 21-year-old girl who was evicted with her family because they couldn’t afford rent with their combined incomes.

The stories are vaguely reminiscent of the bald, emotional stories that made postsecrets.com a phenomenon. Ironically, one of this week’s posts is: Every time I get a bill in the mail I have a panic attack.

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